Archive for
January 2nd, 2008

I placed GCQXR7, also known as GAG7 – Cedarview Park ‘n’ Cache, in early-October 2005 for the seventh Go And Get ‘Em event in Ottawa. The original cache container was a small Altoids tin with a rare earth magnet that I had painted with a cracked metallic grey paint. It was stuck on the underside of the flange at the base of a lamp pole in a park-and-ride parking lot near an interchange on the 416.

It blended in very well, but everything became damp in just a few days, so clearly the container wasn’t waterproof. I replaced it with a small Lock & Lock container with a rare earth magnet on the bottom. I placed this one in a more sheltered location — inside the base of the lamp post.

At the time, it seemed like the perfect location — sheltered and relatively easy to reach. I didn’t give much thought to the bundle of wires running up one side of the inside of the pole. The container was placed in such a way that it was far enough away from the wires. Naturally, I assumed people would put it back where they retrieved it from. As anyone who has placed a cache knows, geocache containers often have this tendency to wander around where they were placed. On a couple of occasions, I found my container tucked up higher into the pole, sometimes behind the wires running inside it. Yikes!

Another problem with the location was that it was possible to fumble the container when retrieving it or replacing it with the end result being that it ended up at the bottom of the hollow concrete base about 1m below the surface. This happened twice. The first time, another geocacher retrieved it and tied it off so it couldn’t fall again. The second time, model12 retrieved it again, and put a more foolproof tie-down in place. A tip o’ the hat to him for doing this (twice). 🙂

Overall, it was logged as found 124 times, which is quite respectable. Thank you to everyone who sought it out. People seemed to like the cache, but as geoSquid pointed out in comments on my blog entry about lamp post caches, many LPCs are inherently dangerous because of the wires running inside virtually every lamp post and this was one of them. I didn’t want anyone to be injured or killed because they were electrocuted because something caused the insulation on the wires to crack or they came loose.